Determinants of influence in electronic word of mouth communication within Facebook

Word of mouth (WOM) communication is being magnified and amplified on a vast and unprecedented scale by free, easy to use technologies. Where once thoughts and experiences regarding products and brands were shared orally one-to-one or in small groups, WOM has been transformed by social media into electronic word of mouth communication (eWOM) with hundreds of friends and acquaintances. Consumers can now discuss and share their experiences with brands and products on social networking sites such as Facebook. Using the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), this study identifies factors that affect the influence of eWOM in the Facebook News Feed. Argument strength, source expertise, tie strength and purchase decision involvement are identified as important variables in this study and their effect on attitude towards a product and intention to purchase a product are investigated. The study found that contrary to the expectations of the ELM, Facebook users were not using the strength of the argument contained in the eWOM to make judgements about their intention to purchase a product. Users were instead using the heuristic cue of source expertise to inform their purchase behaviour. Tie strength was also used as a heuristic cue to determine whether an eWOM message was worthy of their attention. This study adds to the literature regarding the influence mechanism of eWOM in Facebook and provides further insight for social media marketers

Maria Cosway’s Hours: Cosmopolitan and Classical Visual Culture in Thomas Macklin’s Poets Gallery

Thomas Macklin’s Gallery of Poets opened at the Mitre Tavern in Fleet Street in 1788 with the aim to ‘display British Genius’ through ‘Prints Illustrative of the Most Celebrated British Poets’. Early newspaper coverage promised ‘a monument of the powers of the pencil in England, as the Vatican is at Rome’. The incongruous juxtaposition between Fleet Street and the Vatican spells out the cosmopolitan ambition of the literary gallery phenomenon through its real and imagined geographies of display. Through the format of the paper gallery of prints, Macklin’s Poets offered the inventions of British Poets as a repository of painting. This chapter examines how the cosmopolitan idiom of the paper gallery is negotiated in the first number of Macklin’s Poets. This essay examines the extent to which this ambition was achieved in the first Number of Macklin’s Poets which carried an engraving of Maria Cosway’s The Hours, originally a painting with an impressively European iconographic heritage. The painting was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1783, and was retroactively associated by Macklin with Thomas Gray’s ‘Ode on the Spring’. The trope of the Hours brought with it a weighty provenance derived from classical marble bas-relief, through the antiquarian pages of Pietro Santi Bartoli and Bernard de Montfaucon to Flaxman’s designs for Wedgwood plaques and vases. Cosway’s name also imported into Gray’s poem her reputation as a cosmopolitan, cultured woman who had completed the Grand Tour and who moved in elite circles including those of the Prince of Wales in London and the Duke of Orleans, Pierre d’Hancarville and Thomas Jefferson in Paris. The iconographies of the painting, the print, and the poem articulate a European cosmopolitan tradition for British Art